Out of Work? Here's How To Socially Network & Get That Job!

By Robert "Scobleizer" Scoble at Scobleizer.com. Robert is the KING of Twitter, Facebook, All software, and social marketing in general. This article hits so many personal points I discuss with clients that I just had to post it. So let's all lift our glasses - here's to Robert!

I’m getting a LOT of chats from people who have been laid off. Most of the time I find that they just aren’t presenting a good face to me for me to help them find a new job.

If you are laid off, here’s what you need to do:

1. Your blog is your resume. You need one and it needs to have 100 posts on it about what you want to be known for.
2. Remove all friends from your facebook and twitter accounts that will embarrass you. We do look. If we see photos of people getting drunk with you that is a bad sign. Get rid of them. They will NOT help you get a job.
3. Demonstrate you are “clued in.” This means removing ANYTHING that says you are a “social media expert” from your Twitter account. There is no such thing and even if there were there’s no job in it for you. Chris Brogan already has that job and he’s not giving it up.
4. Demonstrate you have kids and hobbies, but they should be 1% of your public persona, not 99%. Look at my blog here. You’ll see my son’s photo on Flickr once in a while. But mostly I talk about the tech industry, cause that’s the job I want to have: talking to geeks and innovators.
5. Put what job you want into your blog’s header. Visit Joel Spolsky’s blog. He’s “on software.” That’s a major hint that if he were looking for a job that he is totally, 100%, thinking about software. If you want a job as a chef, you better have a blog that looks like you love cooking.
6. Get rid of any 'smart' name/acronym like "LOLCats". Do not argue me on Twitter about this. Google finds Twitters. Do you want your future potential boss noticing that you post LOLCats all day long? Believe me, you do not. It will NOT help you.
7. Post something that teaches me something about what you want to do every day. If you want to drive a cab, you better go out and take pictures of cabs. Think about cabs. Put suggestions for cabbies up. Interview cabbies. You better have a blog that is nothing but cabs. Cabs. Cabs. Cabs all the time.
8. Do not beg for links. If you did the above, you can Twitter me and say “check out my great software blog” though. Include @scobleizer in the tweet so I’ll see it. I’m an egotistical person so I read all Twitter replies that include my @scobleizer name in them. Hint: I haven’t met a blogger yet who is not an egotistical person. Take advantage of it. But no begging.
9. If you want to be a plumber, look for other plumbers to add to Twitter, friendfeed, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remove all others. Be 100% focused on what you want to do.
10. On Twitter you can tell me what you had for lunch, but only after you posted 20 great items about what you want to do. Look at Tim O’Reilly’s tweet stream. Very little noise. Just great stuff that will make you think (he wants a job as a thinker, so do you get it yet?)
11. IMPORTANT: Invite influentials out to lunch. Getting a job is now your profession. If you were a salesperson, how would you get sales? You would take people out to lunch who can either buy what you’re selling, or influence others who can buy. That means take other bloggers (but only if they cover what you want to do) out to lunch. That means taking lots of industry executives out to lunch.
12. Send out resumes. Make sure yours is up to date and top notch on LinkedIn and other sites where employers look for employees. Craig’s List. Monster. Etc.
13. Go to industry events. I have a list of tech industry events up on Upcoming.org. If you want to be a plumber, go to where contractors go. Etc. Etc. Make sure you have clear business cards. Include your photo. Include your Twitter and LinkedIn addresses. Your cell phone. Your blog address. And the same line that’s at the top of your blog. Joel’s should say “on software.” Yours should say what you love to do. Hand them out, ask for theirs. Make notes on theirs. Email them later with your LinkedIn and blog URLs and say “you’ll find lots of good stuff about xxxxxxxx industry on my blog.”
14. When you meet someone who can hire and who you want to work for - Follow them on Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Their blog. Stalk them without being “creepy.” Learn everything you can about them. Build a friendfeed room with all their stuff. That way when they say on Twitter “I have a job opening” you can be the first one to Tweet back.
15. Tell others where the jobs are. One thing I learned in college is by helping other people get jobs you’ll get remembered. So, retweet jobs messages (if they are relevant to your professional friends and to you). Blog about job openings. Help people get jobs. Hold lunches for people who are jobless. Some of them will get jobs and they’ll remember you and invite you along.
16. Do what you want to do. Let’s assume you’ll be laid off for a year. Are you going to lay around on the couch waiting for a call? No. You will do exactly what you want to do. Want to be an engineer at a great startup? Go and volunteer to work there for free. Make sure you do a blog post about every day you do what you’re doing for free. Say “I could do this for you, call…”
17. Do some work on SEO. Make it possible for people to find you. THINK about how people would search for someone with your expertise and skills. Here’s how, Visit the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Do a search on a word that you think represents best what you want to do. I just did one for “Electrical Engineering” and it brought up a ton of great info about what people are searching for. Include those terms in your blog. And, even better, blog about those things!
18. Remove any hint that you hated your old job from all your online things.

Good luck. It sucks. I know that. I was laid off last time and, who knows, might be laid off again, but if you’re doing all this stuff and you aren’t finding a job, let me know. You know where to find me.

How to kill e-mail (before it kills you).

E-mail has become a pandemic disease. Here's the cure. By Mike Elgan at Computerworld

The average executive spends two hours a day on e-mail. That adds up to roughly one day per week.

We probably waste a lot of time every day on phone calls and meetings, too. The difference is that the demands on your time don't grow automatically as they do with e-mail.

E-mail has become a pandemic social disease. The more you get, the more you send. And the more you send, the more you get.

And I'm not just talking about e-mail viruses. The longer you use it, the more of it comes at you. The quantity of e-mail you get grows and never stops growing.

In the 1990s, e-mail was all good. At first, you had to be on the same office system or consumer service to exchange e-mail. But then the Internet made it possible to send messages from AOL to CompuServe, and from CompuServe to MCI. E-mail was wonderful. You could search it. You could send attachments and links.

Slowly, gradually, e-mail became something else. Every communications medium has its own costs and benefits. But with e-mail, the costs grow over time as the benefits shrink.

What's wrong with e-mail? In a nutshell, the medium is perfectly designed for information overload. Both message size and quantity are essentially unlimited. Unfortunately, electronic communication is like a gas: It expands to fill its container. It's way too easy to copy everyone and "Reply All." It's also easy for companies to automate the sending of e-mail. There are almost no barriers to an unlimited number of people sending you an unlimited quantity of random stuff. But your time and attention are truly limited.

Because e-mails tend to be so many and so long, it's not friendly for reading on a cell phone. So, as we become more mobile, e-mail becomes less compatible with how we live and work.

E-mail has always suffered from another flaw: It facilitates miscommunication. When you're typing out words, you're thinking one thing, but the receiver can perceive your intent as something else. You're being funny. They perceive hostile. The reason is that humans are designed to communicate with words, facial expressions, body language and hand gestures all together. When you send only cold, black-and-white words, the other person can easily read into your message inaccurate intent or emotional content.

The experience of using e-mail has become like walking through a bad, big-city neighborhood at night. This person wants to rip you off; that person wants to offer you drugs or some shady sexual service; yet another is trying to infect you with a virus. You're literally dealing with organized crime syndicates every single day. Who needs that?

Everything -- from the most important business communication to love notes from your spouse to software that will damage your computer to bank fraud -- is all dumped into the same in-box in random order. In order to find an important message from your boss, you have to wade through raw sewage.

Meanwhile, the most precious resource you have is your own attention. At the very least, e-mail is a massive, constant distraction. And because you really do live in an attention economy, all that objectionable e-mail you get every day is taking money away from you and your company.

While the signal-to-noise ratio of e-mail has declined, other forms of communication have emerged and improved. Now we have free video messaging, chat, social-network messaging and Twitter.

Those are nice, but that e-mail just keeps coming.

It's time for you to reboot your entire communication strategy and start over. The goal is to transition to better forms of communication, and stop using e-mail altogether -- at least stop using it the way you have been doing. Here's how:

1. Set up a Twitter account. You can use your account as a way for people you don't know to contact you.

2. Set up a "public" e-mail account as a data repository. Use an online e-mail service. I prefer Gmail because it has better spam filtering and better search than other services.

Use the public address for whenever you set up an account with any service and it requires an e-mail address, and give it out as your one e-mail address. In most cases, you can just use your existing e-mail account for this.

Set up an autoreply message informing e-mail senders that you do not check this e-mail. If they would like to contact you, they should call you on the phone, message you on Facebook or send you a direct message on Twitter. But here's the trick: Give them only your Twitter name, not your phone number or Facebook profile address. (People you know should already have your phone number or Facebook profile. If they don't, they can ask on Twitter.)

(If you want to explain what you're doing, just link to this article in your autoreply and let me explain it for you.)

The purpose of all this is to set up a barrier or a filter. If people want your attention, they'll have to earn it. Only real, motivated people will be able to contact you, not automated message servers, not Nigerian scammers. When they do, they're forced by the system to keep it short. If you don't want to hear from them again, you can block them on Twitter with one click.

If you have to send long-winded e-mails for whatever reason, you can use this public account to do so. If others have to send long-winded e-mails to you, they can use this address, too. But they'll have to inform you on Twitter, and you can decide whether it's worth the trouble.

Whenever you need to access the stuff that flows into this e-mail address, you use Gmail's search feature to find it. It works just like Google itself.

3. Set up a "secret" e-mail account for content. This second account is for content, namely e-mail newsletters. Use whatever service you want for this. Move all your subscriptions to this account. Now, whenever you want to read your newsletters, you can do so without spam or all the other clutter and junk that normally accompany e-mail.

4. Set up a Facebook account. I recommend doing all messaging with people you actually know well (friends, family and co-workers) on Facebook because people need your permission in advance to send you messages.

5. Set up a Skype account and get a webcam. When you get in the habit of using Skype video calls instead of certain types of e-mail, you'll skip all the needless miscommunication that happens with e-mail. Let's say you need to discuss a personnel issue with a subordinate working in another city, or discuss a personal matter with a relative. Do yourself a favor and do videoconferencing. It will be faster, and you'll communicate without misunderstandings.

The idea here is to take all that stuff you're getting via e-mail and separate it into an appropriate place. Each type of communication is directed into a vastly more effective process based on who's sending it.

Random information is autofiled into a searchable system in case you need it. Newsletter content is all put in one place so you can read it with concentration. Strangers are forced to contact you on Twitter in a short message. Friends, family and co-workers that you approve send you messages on Facebook. And video Skype is for any conversation prone to miscommunication.

Once you've set this up, you've eliminated e-mail from your life, and with it, the spam, scams, junk, long-winded messages and other massively time-wasting garbage. Meanwhile, you're forcing anyone who wants to consume your most precious of resources -- your time and attention -- to get permission in advance and keep it short. And it's all mobile-friendly, too.

If killing e-mail is proscribed by company policy, you'll have to modify these instructions. A typical scenario is that an employee is required to give the corporate e-mail address to business contacts and to reply to e-mail on the company system. But you can still redirect all Web site sign-up traffic, e-mail newsletters and other stuff to the "public" and "private" Gmail accounts. You can urge colleagues or contacts to call you, or use chat. In other words, you can minimize, rather than kill, your company e-mail. And, of course, you can kill your personal e-mail.

E-mail is a disease. By taking strong action to cure yourself, you'll radically reduce the quantity of messaging in your life, while improving its quality.

Things I learned from Warren Buffett.

I just went back to my notes from a video of Warren Buffett speaking his mind. Here are a few of his tips on investing, business, and life.

• There are no called strikes in the ballgame of investing. You do not lose a single penny by passing on any given investment. Even if someone else hits a homerun with it, doesn’t mean that you are missing out. That said, you will have to swing the bat if you ever want to get anywhere. Just make sure it is a good pitch.

• Do business with people you like and who share your objectives. Money should not be only consideration when making business decisions. We have all worked with some people who we would have paid any amount NOT to work with. If we could quantify joy and happiness, it would be easy to see that working with people you like would far outweigh the joy received by getting more money with bad business partners.

• Invest in companies selling products that consumers are not concerned with price.

• It’s not about the biggest motor, but the most efficient motor. A smaller company that is run efficiently is going to do better for their shareholders than a mammoth company with wasteful spending.

• Don’t worry about what the stock market will do, focus on what the company will do. Good companies can and will go up even in the middle of falling market.

• With stocks it is hard to know WHEN something will happen, but it is easy to know WHAT will happen. Everyone seems to be concerned with the WHEN, but focusing on the WHAT seems to yield a nice fruit.

• Find companies with endless demand for their products. Funeral homes will always be needed, because people are still dying.

• Leave your children enough money so they can do anything, but not enough that they don’t have to do anything.

• Decision making abilities fade as cash flow increases. If you only have $5 in your pocket until the end of the week, it is likely that you will make a good decision with it, because it is all you have. On the other hand, if you have $100 for the week, your decisions regarding a $5 purchase are far less critical since you have another $95. Therefore, people tend not to treat those decisions with the same respect they would if it was their last $5.

How To Manage The Unmanageable.

Due to many interpersonal, generational, or behavioral elements — you will always bump into the troubled employee. How do you manage them?

Many times during my 20+ years of corporate management, I ran into certain team members who just didn't play by my rules. This is not a rare situation in business and there are three clear outcomes:

• You ultimately fire them. (bad)

• You understand how they 'operate' and then you integrate their style into your processes. (better)

• You teach them how to work within your management structure. (best)

Of course the first is the last resort, but I've had to do this on a number of occasions — usually do to the associate's disinterest of their position. In the end, it's better for the both of us.

The second outcome, being flexible, is a better outcome, but causes you to modify your management, their communication, work habits, delivery for each of your team members. That's okay when you have 1-2 direct reports, but it becomes unmanageable when you have 5-7.  Now some will disagree with me (and I encourage your comments!) - and you might manage your team this way presently - but the personalized nature of this management style will cause you to spend more hours than necessary trying to understand, manage, and navigate each personality.

So, the third — have them work within your management style is the best. Why? They ascribe to your schedule, your input/output of communication, and they align with your measures of interaction with their teams. Another side benefit is that they learn another management method that might be better than their own, developing a flexible work style that will benefit them for their entire career.

One way I got my team to report to me is to use this basic template each time we had a status meeting:

1. What did I accomplish?

2. What is planned for next week?

3. Long Term Projects (with deadline dates)

4. Concerns & Issues (with solutions)

If each team member filled this out, I could immediately see what they got accomplished, what they will be working on, what is on the horizon, and what obstacles they are running into. The only two rules — they have to keep it to one page and the bulleted items underneath each area must be short phrases - not run-on sentences. This allowed me to review quickly and make comments. Our meetings were quick, focused and powerful.

In addition, they then review their week and slowly become more delivery focused. No more run-on projects without an end date. At the end of the year, it also makes their review soooo easy - they just review a summary of their sheets.

Thank you.

I'm overwhelmed by your enthusiasm!

I've received 200+ responses over the past 24 hours from friends, colleagues, clients, and strangers (who are now friends) on my new site launch.

Not only congratulations, but sincere, precise, and constructive feedback - the backbone of any website launch. Over the next few weeks, my team and I will be integrating many of your great ideas into my site, my newsletters, my tweets, my facebook updates, and linkedin profile. WOW.

It's pretty evident that there is change in the air business-wise. Your massive response reinvigorates and redefines my beliefs on Connecting.

Thank you - Rich

There are three types of people in this world.

Those who make things happen.Those who watch things happen. Those who wonder what happened.

Which one will you be today?

We use the Robert Langdon/Sophie Neveu characters from Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code as examples with many of our clients. What are they like?

• Smart - top of their professions.

• Heroic - will do what has to be done.

• Action-oriented - when confronted with a problem/obstacle, they take action.

• Focused - thinks deeply about the topic at hand.

• Clever - thinks outside of the box.

• Communicative - takes charge, but not in an offensive way.

We can go on and on. Bottom line, these two characters present personas that one can use to take action, rather than retreat and let someone else take a chance. It might sound funny or ridiculous - but next time you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, one where you are forced to step out of your comfort zone - pick a character - and focus on their strengths, make them yours, and you will initiate action immediately.

Short Term Thinking.

What ever happened to Five Year Plans? Long Term Planning?

• It's probably the reason why our economy is in the state it is currently in.

• It's most likely why many companies fail to grow and just keep things the same.

• It's the reason why your team is always questioning your decisions.

• It's the reason why there is massive churn at the top of many companies.

What ever happened to Five Year Plans? They became dirty words over the past 10 years. Anyone who ascribed to a 3-5 year plan was not a forward thinker, someone who was not 'up with the times', or a 'Web 2.0' executive (by the way, Web 2.0 as a descriptive term has been dead for a long time).

What the business glitterati forgot is that long term planning is focused on a GOAL - and the route to that goal might change - and even the goal might change. Unfortunately, the latest fad 'state' of executive management is to come on board and throw out everything that was done before and start anew. Then your successor comes on board (after you have received a very handsome golden parachute) and throws out your plan and begins anew. And so it goes.

I charge that this cleansing of capitalism must wash away the flippant ways of past executives. We need the captains of industry to lead with bold visions and stay the course - and never waver. I hope I am right.

What long term plans do you have?

Focus on your career, not work.

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Sounds a little contradictory, doesn't it? Aren't you supposed to work at work? Doesn't your career progress based on your work? Yes and No. Of course you are supposed to work at work. That's how you get things done. Unfortunately, most executives spend too much time working and not enough time on their career. What do I mean by career? Here are some examples:

• What is your 30/60/90 day plan for your career?

• Who do you know? Who do you need to know, meet and develop a relationship?

• Are the projects/initiatives you manage important/critical to your company? Which ones are?

• How is your company doing? How are your competitors doing?

• Should you stay or go to another company?

Most of the time, we get so caught up in the meetings, the emails, the reviews, and the interpersonal crises, that we lose our long-term vision. Worst-case, after 3-5 years, you are still doing the same-old-stuff, working the same old projects, with the same old people - and you are ripe for a layoff.

Your job is to look at your career through career glasses - monitor and measure where you've been, where you are, and where you're going. Regularly measure what have you accomplished, what are you doing right now, and what you're future prospects might be. Ask yourself the bulleted items above — you'll find that you will have direction, defined activities, and clear goals.

When you are on a trip (that's really what your career is - a loooong trip with regular stops), you need to always know where you are going to end up. If you don't, then it's just a ride — and you don't want to just coast through life.

My first mistake in 2009.

I made an incredible blunder the other day. I let the media and other people's perception of our economy get me down. Boy - I got REALLY nervous. Scared that I was losing clients, businesses were shuttering left and right, thousands laid off, dogs and cats falling from the sky -- real apocalyptic thinking. And this is from the guy that has "decided not to participate in this recession"! Have you been there lately? So I immediately sat down and came up with these three tips to learn from my mistake:

• Don't drink the Kool-Aid. The news is sensationalized and fear sells. Things are rarely as good as they seem and things are rarely as bad as they seem.

• Negative thinking will not move you forward. Look for the positive, find solutions, and don't dwell on the past or fear the future. Live in the present.

• Embrace your fear. When people get scared, they get smart and they take action. Re-vision your career -- if things are changing, you change. Don't get caught in 'old-think' -- interact with people and clearly see where the wind is blowing -- then act swiftly.